Claudine at St Clare’s

Enid Blyton's Claudine at St Clare's is a school story for 9 year olds about a French girl who does not accept that English rules apply to her.

What happens

Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan walk into the fourth form room at the start of the summer term feeling extremely grand. They remember being first-formers, back when they were known as the Stuck-up Twins and loathed the place. They have come a long way.

Two things are wrong this term. The old Matron, round and jolly and known to half the girls' mothers, has fallen ill. The new one is thin and sour and smiles only with her mouth.

And then Mam'zelle's own niece arrives from France, having missed the first day because she caught, in her words, a measle.

Claudine is the best thing in the book by a mile. Small, dark, cheeky and entirely unbothered. At her last school she borrowed the ladder that the science mistress had climbed up into a tree, so there was no science lesson that day.

She copies her homework openly from the girl beside her, and since that girl is not much good at sums, she mostly copies the wrong answers. When the head girl tells her this is cheating, Claudine is honestly puzzled. Cheating is a secret thing, she says. Everyone can see her doing it.

She borrows pencils and forgets to give them back. She greets her new class with "Hallo, buddies". She is impossible to stay cross with for more than about a minute.

Alongside all that, Blyton is doing something sharper with Angela, a beautiful new girl who arrives with three tennis rackets and two chauffeurs, and with poor Alison, who attaches herself to Angela and gets frozen out every time she has an opinion of her own. Anyone who has watched a child orbit a friend who is not very nice to them will recognise it instantly.

This sits well into the St Clare's books. The twins are established fourth-formers with years of history behind them, so a first-timer will pick up references to people and events they have not read about.

Some of it is very much of its era. Claudine's Frenchness is the joke, over and over again, and girls get sorted into "common" and not common by the ones who think that matters.

This is one for a child who reads school stories for the small daily politics rather than the plot. Nobody saves the world here. Somebody borrows a pencil and does not give it back, and that turns out to be plenty.

What to read next

Go back to the beginning and you get The Twins at St Clare's, with the pair of them furious about a school where the dormitories sleep six, there is no private study, and they are quite determined to make everyone sorry about it.